Call of Duty anti-cheat technique makes cheating chumps unable to see other players

A new anti-cheating technique in Call of Duty: Vanguard makes it so that other players are invisible to the cheaters when playing online.

Ever join a lobby in a game and think ‘this server is dead?’ That might now be because you’re a cheat, as a new anti-cheat system called Ricochet that’s been added to Vanguard has added a unique technique called Cloaking. This new technique was detailed over on the Call of Duty blog, diving into how it’s meant to combat cheating (thanks, Game Developer).

“With Cloaking, players that are detected to be cheating can find themselves unable to see opposing players in the game world,” reads the blog post. “Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters. Legitimate players, however, can see cheaters impacted by cloaking (generally, they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, “Who is shooting me?!”) and can dole out in-game punishment. This […] gives legitimate players a leg up on cheaters.”

Essentially, this new technique is a big, and quite clever, middle finger to anyone that tries to cheat in the game. To the cheater, each map will just be an empty wasteland of solitude. And to every other player, the cheater essentially becomes a free kill.

The blog post also makes mention of in-game mitigation techniques that are designed to “reduce the impact of cheaters, while also collecting data that’s essential to identify cheating behavior.” Cloaking is one of the earlier techniques that has been implemented in the game, though the team is still working on other ways of combating cheating.

As well as this, if a player is discovered to be cheating, they’ll be deleted from the leaderboard, a pretty standard and fair punishment for trying to falsify being good at an interactive toy.

Vanguard and Warzone’s season three has also been detailed recently, showing off new maps, new weapons, and for some reason Godzilla and King Kong.